Non-existence of “VP Ellipsis in Disguise” in Modern Chinese

The discussion about whether there is "VP Ellipsis in disguise" in Modern Chinese has lasted for a long time.In "VP Ellipsis in disguise", the verb moves outside the VP before ellipsis takes place, leaving the object in the VP, therefore only the object is deleted on surface when VP Ellipsis occurs.Through examining the components of the VP and their syntactic position, this paper discovers that manner adverbials, adjuncts of postverbal frequency/duration, complements introduced by the complementizer "de" and indefinite objects cannot be elided; these components are all located inside VP.These arguments lead us to conclude that there is no "VP Ellipsis in disguise" in Modern Chinese.Base on this observation, we further find that the object position normally has a focus reading; hence, the object cannot be deleted at its original position.Instead, it moves to the initial topic position of the sentence for deletion, leaving a trace at the original position which has an internal syntactic structure.